Celebrating Protest

That’s what I meant but I never explained. But I also let the audience feel as they do and as they like, so I get various images of the end of the world as I still hold onto my image and my meaning of the end of the world

Norma: So, there’re many ends of the of world.

Kamanaka: If you lose your life in the sense of feeling, that is a lot. Not objective. That’s what I found.

Student: Hi, there’s a part in the beginning when you are in Iraq and you were with a team looking at the remnants of tank rubble in what seemed like the ‘highway of death’ near Basra. I was wondering if that was very dangerous being so close to the highway of death where there were 310 tons of depleted uranium used?

Norma: I always get nervous when I watch that scene, too. I think, ‘What is she doing?’

Kamanaka: But at that time I was so ignorant about it.

Student: Because Doug Rokke, he went to Iraq to investigate, and I believe he suffered radiation poisoning.

Kamanaka: Yes, he is sick. Did you get any news from Doug Rokke?

Guest: Not recently. He lives here in Illinois, down in Champaign-Urbana.

Kamanaka: I think it’s very strange that if 100 people are exposed to the same level of radiation, not all of them will get sick. There is a certain percentage of the 100 people that becomes ill. I was one who got sick - I got really ill after I got back from Iraq because of my exposure to radiation. By walking around polluted tanks, I encountered depleted uranium from Operation Desert Storm. So when I was shooting tanks in the south of Iraq, then I went back to Baghdad…

Norma: It's not Desert Storm, Desert Storm was the Gulf War. It was Operation Iraqi Freedom, 1998.

Kamanaka: It started the evening of December 16, just after I changed the date to the 17th. I went to United Nations office because I had an appointment to interview United Nations people. Then I realized that three weeks before I asked them to interview, many offices said “I can’t do it that day.” I asked the very date of the 16th of December, so only one employee did the interview. I went to the United Nations office but nobody was around. And then I heard them say, “You didn’t know that the bombings were starting tonight? You should escape.” I replied, “How?” It was so shocking because you need to get a special card to escape; to go over the border. You need to get a specific driver and precise card, and you need to get a stamp from the Ministry of Information. It was too late for me to organize a departure so without a choice, I stayed in Baghdad. My hotel stood beside the Tigris river and in front of the river was Saddam Hussein’s palace. They really hit this palace. Everybody went to shelter as the first missile landed in the center of Baghdad. It was huge. For four nights, I stayed in a shooting war zone. From what I recall, I did inhale a lot of smoke. It was all over. After I researched, I still had the image that they used depleted uranium missiles at that time. There is a research institute in London, it is famous now, Cheney bought it recently it. This is a really good institute that researches air pollution. They have data on many kinds of particles and you can see video. When the gunboat started, uranium-238 was really high in the air of the inland. During the Gulf War and also when I was staying, and when the US started hitting Afghanistan, you can see. On the same date, they already got particles in the air. So it really goes around the world.

Student: Right, I heard it’s just 4 days from Iraq to America through the air.

Norma: What did you do when you realized you were exposed?

Kamanaka: Just after I went back to Japan, I felt my immune system was really down. I started with diarrhea and my joints became powerless. I really was sick. I tried many things to detox, to wash out the heavy metals from my body. But it became cancer, so I was diagnosed with cancer while I was editing this film. So my doctors suggested I get an operation. I asked him to wait—I’m making films. After I finish my films, I’ll do it. Then I finished. Then after six days, an operation was planned then I went to the hospital and I felt I shouldn’t do it. So I said no. there were many doctors and nurses who came to me and said I should do it.

Norma: This was 2003?

Kamanaka: Yes, and they were so angry with me. And I didn’t change my mind. So, then I started taking alternative medication. I took many different types of drugs and it all really worked out. I am feeling close to cured. Maybe my next film is going to be about medication issues because I feel like I’m sending chemotherapy drugs to Iraq for children, but I also feel like chemotherapy drug treatment is increasing cancer.

Student 2: How did you cure yourself?

Kamanaka: Acupuncture, Chinese medicine, and also qigong. Casey Root was doing Qigong. I was looking for him because I had information he is working for the sight as an inspector. I called him and he did a second whistleblower, and was fired again.

Norma: Oh, he was fired twice.

Kamanaka: And when I called him, his girlfriend said he wasn't here anymore, but I left my cell phone number and said if you get in touch with him please let him know that I am looking for him.

He was attending a conference in Chernobyl and found that survivors, long-life survivors of radiation, were doing yoga or qigong. It’s true. And he came back to Hanford and he got the idea to teach qigong to workers who had symptoms from radiation exposure. So, qigong is really effective. I also received chemotherapy.

Student 3: So, why did you kind of refuse operation before trying?

Kamanaka: I was planning to get it because I want to live. So it’s strange that after I finished my film, I started having the same dream telling me not to get an operation. I believed in it. At the beginning I was dreaming that I saw the well, black, so I was kind of pulling into this bottomless black well, and if I went into the well I would die. I was so scared and I kept dreaming of this image. One day, so many people who I don’t know sent me tea, medicine, and food because I was losing weight. I lost maybe ten kilograms of weight. I was becoming slimmer by the minute.

Norma: Ten kilograms is about twenty-two pounds.

Kamanka: So, people were getting worried and they sent me medicine, including brown rice and ginger tea. I really felt love from them, love from so many people. Then this bottomless well started to form a deeper bottom. Suddenly, I could see the bottom, and it wasn’t so deep. I could stand. The water drained and I could stand there and wheat was growing in the water. On the last day, I could see violets blossoming and I felt I fine and didn’t need to get an operation. It was right. I think I made the right choice. I didn’t lose anything.

Norma: You gained. Do you know if the Hanford workers are taking qigong lessons?

Kamanaka: I don’t know. Casey Root - maybe I should call him. In China and in Japan, specific qigong is created for each cancer. For breast cancer patients, do this qigong, for lung cancer patients, do that qigong. So, it’s really effective. This is a digression.

When I met Iraqi children, I was really angry about what’s going on in Iraq and I was thinking who was responsible about this happening in Iraq. I thought maybe the United States, and Great Britain, and the international world was so cold. Especially for the child I mentioned before, Rasha. She left a message.

Norma: Do you remember her?

Kamanaka: I have felt responsible, but it was too heavy to hold by myself. So if I can make this film and release my responsibility to so many people. So I could make this film, and so many people saw it. If the film goes on and gets an audience, then my responsibility and pressure to do change something about this issue can be a little lighter. I could share with so many people. People who saw this film could feel some responsibility.

Norma: Oh, I see.

Student: You were just mentioning earlier today that the phrase, "the end of the world" means each person’s experiencing by themselves in their own way, but would you also speak about the film making community in people giving you rice and tea? Is this a way of making people not experience it by themselves? Is this a counteracting force?

Kamanaka: Yes, sort of. I didn’t get any sympathy from media people. They just ignore a lot and they’re not interested in what I’m doing. It’s the same thing in Japan and maybe all around the world: people who belong to the society belong to companies and corporations, so they became slaves. They are not liberated. They can not whistle. They cannot be a whistleblower because they really respect their livelihood to keep. You know, keeping the mantra that “I have children, I have wife, I have old parents to feed, so then I like to keep this job. So you can’t say this is wrong, my company is doing wrong.” So, this kind of people are losing their freedom.

I say the same thing to media people. In Japan, so many people get so little salary, and they’re so busy, and then their boss just says do this and do that, and they stop thinking about whether it is wrong or right, they just do it. They stop thinking. The same thing is in the business world. They don’t’ know what they’re doing. Same thing for scientists, and I know many scientists in Japan.

Norma: But I had forgotten that Rokkasho shows up in this Hibaksha film. Your next project was already anticipated towards the end.

Kamanka: So, I asked to interview many scientists, particularly, nuclear scientists, in Japan to make this film. But almost all of them except for two said no. If they believe it is essential, they should accept my interview. But they said no. And one of them said “Oh, if I accept your interview, I lose my job." Please say that to my camera!

The matter is, Why do you become a scientist? What do you research for? This essential question is forgotten, I think, because I saw this film maybe one month ago in Hiroshima and then people who organized the screening invited ABCC in Japan. I had a dialogue with this guy.

Norma: Wait. ABCC still exists?

Student: Yes, except the name changed.

Kamanaka: Yes. The United States Government provides money. It’s kind of combined with the Japanese government.

Norma: Oh, right.

Kamanaka: So, while I was talking with him, I had gotten so mad. Just two days before we had the conversation, they announced that they had been doing research about the second generation Hibakasha. And after I came here their research found nothing. And they said that second generation hibakasha are normal to other people - nothing different, no effect. So the organizer of the screening were a second generation goup. They were so mad. We are so sobering. What they announced was so humiliating. I was talking with him and he was just doing basic research on radiation and just explaining what radiation does. And I was wondering, "You know you are living in Hiroshima and you are in front of meetings and survivors and they are suffering and you can see. What is your research for?" I really kind of talked strong to him and he couldn’t answer so many questions from me. Then I found out that the scientists were also a businessman in a corporation. So, they are missing a connection between society and themselves; between what they are doing in the corporation and what they’re doing in the institute. But the society exists, and you have to have the feeling and the connection between you and society.

Student: I was just wondering, who funded that study, the one that the scientist said there was no effect?

Kamanaka: Partly by the United States government and partly by the Japanese government.

Norma: Remember, the ABCC is the institution that had doctors that were not treating the victims right after the bombing but just inspecting, examining them for data.

Student: I am just kind of interested in the scientists. My first question is, what is their emotional state when they talk to you? They are basically working for that research - they might have some particular interest in this program. So, to me, if they can’t find anything, they might feel like they must be very certain.

Kamanaka: No, no. The conclusion is always already decided.

Student: So, they may not say, for instance, "If I use this data it’s wrong, or if I use this data it’s okay." I mean, they provide only just one conclusion. They try to show their efforts.

Kamanaka: I’m not a scientist but it’s very strange. All the basic data are taken from survivors in Hiroshima. So it’s called the Hiroshima model. The old data, I think, is here in the United States but it’s not really open to the public. So, they hold their own data. And then they announce, “We’ve been doing 2000 million dollars research to reach this conclusion." And ordinary people cannot say anything.

Norma: But it’s not open to any scientist either, right? Because the data produced in the Hiroshima model is not available for every scientist to examine and try to reverify or contest.

Kamanaka: So after 60 years, we don’t know anything.

Student: Even when they know that they are scientists?

Kamanaka: This guy is Japanese and really has no sympathy for second generation survivors. When I meet people of the second generation, they are really worried about their health and they say things like, “I have a million system problems that I can’t get past through easily. I have low blood pressure symptoms.” Each symptom seems minor and then it goes undetected - you are unaware of your exact diagnosis. But you have many viruses, so it’s kind of difficult. The symptom is ignored and ignored means that it’s not existent. It’s a very difficult side of radiation, right, David? Don’t you think?

Student: Because usually the statistics, I think, prove one way is more effective. For example they might say we can not prove this is effective, so they say there is nothing, or they say we can not prove this is effective.

Norma: Hypothesis. Hypothesize.

Kamanaka: Hypothesize that the damage is there. They don’t see the real people in front of them, so their hypothesis is something else.

Tomomi: Should we ask Dave to talk a little about Illinois’ situation?

Norma: Yes, let’s get to that since he’s here.

Dave: Kamanaka-san and I actually met several years ago in Hamburg and I was surprised to see her again at a conference about the depleted uranium which were the weapons that were used in the Iraq and Balkan wars. Before I say a word about Illinois, I just wanted to mention where you were talking a moment ago about statistics in your experience. This sort of attitude is not just happening in Japan - it’s happening everywhere the nuclear industry is on the planet. Last year, I attended a conference in Kiev, which was the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident. There, the attitudes of the World Health Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency were identical. In fact, the whole purpose of their conference last year was to tell al of us that it wasn’t that bad. They argued that only 4,000 to 8,000 people will die, and I’m sure that makes all of you feel better. The conference I was at had all of the doctors from the countryside - from the surrounding areas, not the major urban centers where the doctors get money for their institutes and professional services. But the people who were being affected tell a different story. So, there’s always this tension between the reality of real people and the reality of constructs—statistics, epidemiology—they have their usefulness but they’re tools, and tools have their limits. You don’t hammer nails with coffee cups. There are limits to this kind of knowing. And we constantly find this with radiation, whether it’s with civilians in Iraq or the veterans in Iraq, because I’m sure you will tell the students later. The connection for my being here was also an accident. I hope you will all see the movie on Friday night. It’s very important. I did not know how bad things were in terms of the process in Japan.

But I want you to know that the George Bush administration is also attempting to resurrect reprocessing in the United States. We have had a prohibition on this for almost 35 years. The only trained nuclear engineer we ever had as a president was the one who stopped reprocessing - that was Jimmy Carter. Now our grade C student, a business major from Yale, wants to start reprocessing and it’s going by a program called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership, and one of the pieces of this partnership is to reprocess the fuel that comes out of the nuclear reactors, separate the materials and, so they say, use the materials again to provide more electricity, more energy. And the trouble is you end up with plutonium, which is exactly what was used in Nagasaki.

So, our organization and hundreds of others around the United States are opposing the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership generally, but there are two sites in Illinois that are actually candidates for nuclear processing. That will tie into what you will see on Friday night when you see the film. I did bring a background sheet on the GNEP program, and if you have any questions we have our contact information on here. The reason I will not be here on Friday night is because I’m presenting at one of the sites here in Illinois against the GNEP program, at a very different location out in Naperville. We also had a presentation about a week or so ago in a community called Morris, Illinois in southwest of Chicago, where they already have three nuclear power plants and 750 tons of reactor fuel sitting their in a swimming pool. That’s the site they want for the next reprocessing facility. I want you to know that there is an active anti-nuclear organization throughout the United States. Despite what you may hear about even countries that love nuclear power like France, their opposition is growing everywhere. The other day I saw that either in Chicago Tribune or the New York Times with an article about the French and their love of nuclear power. What you did not see is that two weeks ago in five major French cities, 20,000 French got off their butts, got on the streets and said no more nuclear power.

Kamanaka: The mass media never talks about it.

Norma: Never.

Dave: 20,000 French!

Kamanaka: Wow.

Dave: And, the French Anti-Nuclear Movement claims to have 700,000 members. Whether we know this is true or not, we’ll leave it up to the statisticians to figure it out. But that’s the point. What is reality? It’s not just what we see in the video. You are going to be seeing another reality.

Kamanaka: So, Rokkashamo Reprocessing Facility is the newest and the biggest in reprocessing nuclear waste in the world. It’s going to start working this year and it’s going to produce 8 tons of plutonium each year. So, why was I shooting this film? It took me two years to complete the movie - I started in March 2004 and ended in March 2006. The opposition people said that if operation starts, 300 times more nuclear plant will come out into the environment. It means you see 300 nuclear power plant files in Rakashamo village. So the population of Rakashamo village is 5,000. I was thinking that, isn’t it too much? Maybe it’s not true. It’s my kind of exaggeration by opposition. Now, they’re doing active tests. The last test was before repopulation. They are doing a less amount of testing but doing the same procedure for operation. Then a candidate of our prefecture, last year this December, they asked the company to give them real figure or number. How much, nuclear files coming out into the environment now. So they opened information on how much they released in November 2006, in one month. It’s 1,300 times more –

Norma: --than a single nuclear power plant in a month.

Kamanka: In a year. The amount produced by a single nuclear power plant is 1,300 times more.

Norma: But in one month.

Kamanaka: In one month. Right.

Norma: So it’s not just 1,300 times, because that still over a year.

Dave: Times twelve.

Kamanaka: And then recently, the last procedure, so you cut a lot of nuclear fuel and put into chemical liquid and melt it, and then you divide plutonium and then uranium and then other high radioactive waste. So then this liquid contain plutonium on a dish, and then you put the microwave on it, and it becomes “powder and opportunity.” It’s the last process of this facility. And then suddenly a long bell was rung, and then the processor stopped. And then they made it by a human operation. So then this guy forget to make it empty. So then powder was removed, and then they put another liquid, containing plutonium again.

Norma: Sub-critical.

Kamanaka: Sub-critical, almost.

Norma: This is Rokashamo.

Kamanka: So, then a 36 year-old guy and a 19 year-old boy inhaled plutonium. Then from the 36 year old guy, he really got internal radiation exposure. And then I met a person whose company operates this facility. I asked what is insurance for them. Do they get compensation? And he said no. Why? Because they’re too small to get ill. But how can you tell? After 5 or 10 years, they might get cancer. And they don’t get compensation? He said it might be another, other causes. Not because of this, because we give don’t give them compensation.

In England, set up there, employees need to sign a contract that says 25% of all cancers they get are high incident. So if you admit, you sign, and the workers get compensation when they get this precise cancer. Only employees.

Norma: But not people who live near them. Dave, maybe you could say, because we’re almost out of time, you could say the three plus one big reason why GNEP is backed, is haunting us now. I was wondering is this in order to just do something with the nuclear waste or what.

Dave: We were having lunch and discussing this. I think this program like many American programs is a Trojan Horse. It looks great on the outside, it seems to be a gift, but when you go inside, that’s where all the problems are. I saw three major problems and then the one persistent problem I’ll save for the end. What they’re tempting to do with this program, first of all, is re-launch an industry that by every standard should have been closed down decades ago. It’s financially incapable of being on its own, the economics are poor, the environmental problems are huge. This industry should have been gone long ago but the government keeps it going. They call this the nuclear renaissance. They’re trying to build more nuclear reactors and you’ve probably heard that they want to do it because they’re going to save us from global warming, which is another fiction and we have some literature on that if you’d like to see. So that was the first thing, is the government is promoting this nuclear renaissance and this is one of the ways to do it.

The second is, after 50-plus years of commercial nuclear power, we still don’t have any environmentally responsible solution for the high-level radioactive waste that have been produced, over five to fifty thousand tons so far. And this is supposedly one way to begin a process that will reduce that amount. They don’t tell you it will take 200 years, and they don’t tell you that you have to build many more reactors of a different type to achieve this at a cost of maybe $200 billion dollars. It’s always in the details. The second so-called reason is to get rid of the high-level radioactive waste we’ve accumulated.

The third one is a little closer to the truth, I believe, and that is the very good explanation of what happens in re-processing is, you’re able to separate out these radioactive materials and take the ones you want to use. Well, there’re only two uses for plutonium on the planet—

Kamanaka: 1%. So all the waste, and only 1% is plutonium.

Dave: And you can only do two things with it. You can either make electricity if you get the right kind of reactors, which in many cases we haven’t even built them yet. And the second thing is, we can make nuclear weapons. And the way they’re promoting this new reactor and this radioactive waste package is, you have to buy them together, which gives any government on the earth the ability to produce plutonium and keep it. Now have we ever had this problem before where our government used peaceful nuclear power to obtain materials and then suddenly there were some bombs lying around? Well it happened in India, Pakistan, South Africa, Israel, and North Korea. Everywhere the peaceful atom goes, nuclear weapons always will follow because that’s the real purpose.

And the final one is, in the meantime, there’s lots of money to be made. General Electric Corporation wants to do GNEP because they know there will be $100 billions dollars worth of possible contracts from the government--guaranteed from your taxes and mine—that they will get. So that’s the bottom line. If they were making ashtrays, I wouldn’t have a problem. But we’re talking about making bombs and accidents of all kinds. So, this is why many of us oppose GNEP because it’s a nuclear proliferation nightmare. It undoes even the incomplete work that many of us have worked on for 50 years to try and quickly get the genie back in the bottle. So if Rakkasho goes forward, quite literally we’re cooked.

Kamanaka: Yes, but what Dave said is not really well-known by people because then… I didn’t say anything bad about re-processing in this film, but you see, and people see, and you have the ability to just think and get conclusions that it’s just useless and just pollutes the environment for nothing. And then there’s the thinking, why do you need to do this? Because we don’t have new reactors and the government says maybe we can get new reactor after 50 or 100 years later, maybe. Then why do you need to produce plutonium now?

Dave: It lasts.

Kamanka: And nobody can answer, so it’s so strange. I call it a mystery of nuclear business.

Tomomi: We need to wrap up. Thank you so much.

Norma: But I also want to say, you know, really thank you to Yuki and her colleagues at DePaul for deciding to invite Kamanaka, which fitted in really nicely with Tomomi and my class, our class. So we get to be screening both her films in Chicago in one week. So I think that’s really magnificent. Kamanaka was telling us over lunch that her producers don’t think Rokkashoma is of any interest to people outside Japan because it’s a very local thing. But as it turns out it’s urgently relevant to us.

Kamanaka: Because you know they say, the pollution goes around the world.

Norma: That too.

Kamanaka: It’s going to be one of the biggest polluters around the world in its operation.

Tomomi: Thank you so much.